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Best Locations to do an MBA

Where are the best places to do an MBA

First of all, these rankings are changing all of the time, and MBA courses can go up and down from month to month. Secondly, there are many different surveys, so you can get different answers depending on whom you ask. To work out the relative reputations of the MBA schools, people will ask MBA recruiters, both in-house and agency, and also MBA candidate and graduates. Whilst people will argue day and night about who is 5th and who is 6th, you can really divide business schools into 3 tiers. First are the schools with a real international reputation. The second tier are the schools with a good European and a top national reputation, and then there are schools with a good national reputation.

Tier 1 - International reputation - London Business School stands out by a significant margin. It is arguable the only UK school of truly international class, and is in the top 10 worldwide. It's only real European competitors are INSEAD and maybe IMD. LBS knows about its advantage and hence charges some very high fees.

Tier 2- European and top national reputation- The key schools in this sector are Warwick , Henley, Imperial, Cass, Cranfield and Manchester . These schools have built especially good reputations in key areas such as manufacturing and marketing for Cranfield, and research for Imperial, and Cass is well known for its links to financial institutions. Anecdotal reports say Cranfield's marketing modules are at least as good as those at LBS.

Other schools here are Oxford (Said), Cambridge (Judge), Edinburgh and Ashridge. The interesting thing to note about Said and Judge is that it is reckoned that their reputation owes more at the moment to the universities they are tied too than the actual quality of their courses. They are helped by McKinsey putting them on their preferred list due to the Oxbridge connection.

These schools offer a very high quality education, but do not possess the "calling card" quality of London Business School , particularly in terms of international recognition.

Finally, any research on the MBA schools will only give a guide as to the reputation of those schools. There is no suggestion that an MBA towards the bottom of a table of 50 are "bad". You should remember that there are almost 100 institutions in the UK that offer MBAs, and these can be in a number of different formats such as part-time, distance learning and specialist ones in marketing or finance for examples. So top 50 ain't bad!